The Baltimore Banner does a quick article on independent restaurants in Baltimore County worth checking out. Some of these are close, some not so much, but there are a couple I’m interested in.
To catch up on the last few weeks, our refrigerator is fixed. We know a guy who knows a guy who fixes things as a side job, and so we called to have him come out. A huge guy named Dave showed up on the doorstep in a worn biker’s jacket and West Coast Choppers hat, and politely got down to business with the balky fridge. Within minutes he had the icemaker out, the back panel off the freezer, and had identified the culprit as the pusher fan which moves cold air from the freezer down to the fridge. The ball bearings had frozen up so it wasn’t doing its job. He neatly stacked the extra parts back in the freezer, made some calls, and had a new unit installed the next afternoon.
The furnace is fixed as well. There was another bad part that needed to be replaced, and the guys who came out to work on it had it diagnosed in minutes. I do have to call them back to have it adjusted, though, because it’s filling the basement with the smell of gas. The second guy gave me a bit of good advice about the tile in the basement, too–apparently if you measure floor tiles there’s a good chance you can tell if they’re made with asbestos by their size. And yes, ours have asbestos. Yay!
Jen took me for my birthday dinner to Woodberry Kitchen in Hampden, and we got to pretend we were adults for an evening. The food was excellent, the cocktails were delicious, and my company was beautiful. Brown liquor isn’t my best friend, but after a Manhattan, an Old Fashioned, and two vodka cocktails with names I can’t recall, I had a minor hangover on Saturday. We hit Eggspectations for brunch and spent the afternoon shopping in preparation for Easter dinner at the house next weekend with Rob and Karis and Barrett flying in from St. Louis on Friday.
Friday evening I found myself at a neighbor’s house watching a skilled man with dreadlocks mix fancy craft cocktails with a bunch of other guys I didn’t know. I was invited by the father of one of Finn’s friends and walked down the street to his house after dinner.
The first cocktail I tried was a barrel-aged Manhattan, which was served over a hand-carved chunk of ice and went down a little rougher than I’d anticipated. Next up was an old fashioned, and by this time I’d made acquaintances with some of the other guys as well as run into another Dad I knew from the playground. As the evening went by I met some other men from the neighborhood, played a few games of darts, sampled a Ho-Ho from the dessert table, smoked a decent cigar, and sampled three more drinks, which were enough to tilt Beechwood Avenue about five degrees on my walk home. And: a true whiskey sour is a new go-to drink for me, because nobody will know how to make a Blood and Sand.
Saturday I recovered quicker than I fairly should have and we made preparations for the annual Ice Cream Social put on by our friends the Wards. Finn got her face painted, chased bubbles, watched the cows walk up the path, and played with balloon swords under a perfect blue sky. We made a brief stop at IKEA for a roller shade part and then got Jen home into bed, after a late-day migraine came on. Finn and I stayed up to watch Monsters vs. Aliens in our Pjs and then went to sleep.
Sunday I hit the Lowe’s for shingle supplies and started peeling 20-year-old layers off the far side of the garage roof. It’s been leaking for a couple of years and this winter it just stayed wet and disintegrated. A closer inspection revealed a hasty patch job over the old shingle but no attempt to repair the sheathing underneath–which was completely gone in some places. I removed several layers and cut bad wood back to the joists, then laid in new sheathing and started tacking shingles back in. There’s about three layers on there in total, which didn’t surprise me, but the amount of water damage was actually less than I thought there would be. I didn’t lay any tarpaper down, which may be a tactical mistake, but we’ll see how it holds up when the next rain falls.
While that was under way, I stoked up the smoker with charcoal and mesquite chips and dropped a 5-lb. bird on the grill. Following the directions, I used about 150% more charcoal than was needed, and so the fire was too hot. As we all know, there’s no turning charcoal down, so I had to pull it off and let the fire die down for about 20 minutes. The final flavor was OK, but the bird was dry, so there will be lots of experimentation and testing before we perfect this method.
I’d like to say Memorial Day Weekend was spent in lazy pursuit of relaxation, but it kind of wasn’t. We were at the neighbors’ on Friday night for dinner and drinks, and had a great time, but one extra-strong beer gave me a pounding headache Saturday morning.
I took on some freelance work last week, and so I found myself behind a computer for 2 of the 3 lovely days we were given; in retrospect I would rather have left the money on the table and gotten outside with my family. Even so, Jen and I celebrated our anniversary at The Food Market, a wonderful hipster restaurant in Hampden. The food was delicious but the bar tab for 4 drinks came to $50, which is Manhattan money, not Hampden money!
Sunday was more work for me while the girls went out to be social; later in the day we were invited back over to the neighbors’ for a more low-key cookout which was what we were all really in the mood for.
Saturday our neighbor stopped by to mention he’s getting a dumpster to haul off a bunch of brush from his yard; he figured he’d have room left over and wanted to know if I might be interested in filling it for splitting the cost. Given that I’ve had a pile of construction rubble sitting alongside the driveway since last summer, I thought this was a swell idea, and will spend part of this coming weekend happily hauling concrete.
Jen and I found ourselves on the couch after a long Sunday of housework and baby-wrangling in front of a show called Holmes on Homes, which is a fascinating HGTV program about a guy who travels around Canada fixing home renovation projects gone wrong. It’s fascinating because of the absolute horror shows they uncover and the lengths they have to go to to make things right, which usually involves several weeks, multiple crews of contractors, and lots of money. On the episode we watched last night, he actually told the homeowners they’d gotten about $150K of work to fix all the problems in their house (a total basement gutting, termite infestation, construction of a new cinderblock wall, and complete plumbing overhaul), which was refreshing and surprising; usually these things are just completed, they do the reveal, homeowners smile and hug, roll credits. While the program is, by design, made to feature the Worst Case Scenario, I like it because the guy is genuinely interested in fixing the problems he finds.
But as I get older, I’m less interested in the rest of the standard HGTV lineup:
- Shows about Manhattan/Los Angeles real estate sales, featuring breathtaking penthouse suites and modern vaulted beachfront palaces
- Shows about “famous” stylists dressing up the houses mentioned above for rich entitled clients
- Shows about annoying stylists with no taste redoing rooms for people with no taste on a budget of $500
- This Old House, which has always catered to people who live in Massachusetts and have no qualms about hiring a building crane to move a 150-year-old oak tree in order to improve their view of the lake while they add a half-million carriage house to the back of their estate
- Shows about rich, entitled real estate agents
- Shows about asshole house flippers and their irritating wives, husbands, and assistants who treat their workers like shit
- Shows about couples who swap renovation projects on their neighbors’ houses
What I’d like to see is a show that deals with normal people in normal houses who have a $5000 project and need some creative ideas on how to get it done. But that probably wouldn’t get any ratings. Instead, I’ll just watch another episode of Hoarders and feel superior while I sip my hot chocolate.
Much of my family history is, to me, a vague bunch of names and dates, people I don’t have a whole lot of contact with, or never met in my life. I’ve gotten more interested in my kinfolk as I’ve gotten older—I think it’s something that comes with the realization that one isn’t 19 forever, and it hits sometime around the second year of mortgage payments. That time in life when one’s friends are all recent parents, and the people we used to shut the bars down with are now on the PTA board.
My grandfather is nearing 90 years old. He’s a retired housepainter. In his prime, he used to load a panel van full of supplies and drive from the Finger Lakes region of New York to Manhattan on Sunday night, at a time when highways didn’t exist. He painted houses in the city from Monday until Friday. Then, he’d load the van back up and return home to his family, and spend the weekend repairing a 100-year-old farmhouse with no insulation or running water, only to turn around and do it again. He has always been a commanding sort of man, the kind of septuagenarian who could still kick ass and play a mean round of golf, even when his backswing was reduced from feet to inches. I remember wiry, ropy muscles in his arms, under a short-sleeve shirt, hoisting my cousins for a tour of the barn. I remember cookouts in the side yard, with he and my grandmother holding court by the Coca-Cola cooler, and cars lined up four deep in front of the house. I remember huddling around the heat registers in the bedroom upstairs, quietly listening to my aunts and uncles tell jokes in the smoky kitchen below. I remember my grandparents full of life, and that’s how I’ll always keep them in my memory.
The last time Jen and I visited with my grandfather, I realized how little I really know about him and my own family. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a picture of my namesake (I am the Fourth.) Travelling in Ireland last year, it became painfully clear to me that I don’t know where my people came from, or when they arrived. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to help Jen’s father get his family history archived, going as far as humping computer equipment to a reunion and scanning every photo album. I haven’t spent nearly enough time with my own family, nor do I know nearly as much about us as I should.
I hatched a plot with my father a few months ago, and got his help in planning for a trip north to sit with my grandfather and talk to him about his family. He has shoeboxes full of photos and reels of 8mm film that may or may not have seen the light of day since the Truman administration. He has letters and pictures and most importantly, his memory to tell the stories behind the pictures, and put faces with names. And luckily for me, as I worked more on this plan, the pieces fell into place faster and easier that I could have hoped.
I mentioned the plan to a friend of mine, purely by chance—I was discussing scheduling for some freelance work. Graciously, he lent me the use of a very expensive professional digital video camera, two very expensive lavalier microphones, and a matching tripod. Junior and Senior will get mic’d, and my father will guide his father through the pictures, getting stories and faces and people straight while I scan and archive everything I possibly can.
We’re heading up there at 9AM tomorrow, and I’m told Grampy has been telling everybody about it excitedly. He’s been instructed by his daughters to shave, wear his good shirts, and behave himself. I’m as excited as he is—there are a ton of questions to ask, and I’m anxious to hear the answers.
This morning, I made reservations for a trip to Ireland for our first anniversary. Originally, having fallen in love with the laid-back, Dolce Vita atmosphere of Italy, we talked about returning there, but plane fare and other considerations ruled out that idea. Other exotic locales beckoned: we talked about Barcelona, Tahiti (one of our honeymoon picks, sidelined due to the exorbitant cost and lengthy flight) and Paris. Gradually most of these fell aside and we seriously discussed Ireland. I’ve always wanted to see the country of my ancestry, and a self-guided tour seemed to be the way to go. We found a preplanned package online through AAA, including lodging and car rental, and signed up for it this morning. We will be driving a compact automatic over hill and dale on the wrong side of the road in search of blarney, real beer, and bland food for nine days in June.
Plane fare was shaping up to be the expensive part of the trip, but I found some dirt-cheap fares from American using Kayak.com, and got us a one-hop flight to Shannon thru Boston for less than the cost of the tour package. There are some more things to be ironed out (we need a place to stay in Dublin and Shannon for a night each and a lift across the country to our return flight, for example) but the major part is done. I’m absolutely thrilled to be going—it’s been a dream of mine for years. The fact that I get to go with my wife and best friend for our anniversary makes it that much better.
In other news, we broke down and ordered $80 worth of groceries from Peapod last night. I figure $6 is worth the hour it would take to go and pick all this stuff up ourselves, and we have better things to be doing with our time right now. Besides, we are lazy consumerist yuppies. Now, to arrange for Starbucks to deliver to our door…
Actually, this is the first time the conveniences of the dot-com days have reached our leafy door; while hipsters in San Francisco and Manhattan could call Webvan back in ’99 for a Penthouse, Coke and candy bar to be delivered to their door free of charge, we never got the option here in Mobtown. It’s (relatively) cheap, it’s available, and we’re taking advantage of it at least once.
Christmas in July was great, and I think it lived up to expectations. We were even lucky enough to have snow falling on Saturday morning. I have to shout out to my sister for the new Porter & Cable router (we have two windows just itching to be refurbished with that) and to my pop for the camera tripod. Jen now has an entire library of gardening and cook books to choose from, Renie finally has a digital camera, Mom has a pile of wedding photos, and my Dad has a wireless hub to tinker with. It was great to see everybody, and we even got a visit with Grampy and Vince, who stopped by for bloody marys after church.
While we were there I updated Mom’s iMac—OS9 gave way to OSX, crashing Eudora gave way to Mail.app, and the lousy Director-based Kodak photo software was replaced with iPhoto. The only hitch was finding that her beige Epson inkjet won’t work with OSX (Epson didn’t bother to write drivers for it.) I will say that I was relieved when Mail.app easily imported her old Eudora mailboxes and iPhoto immediately recognized her camera. She’s going to have much better luck with her computer now.
Continued Geekery. On the way home, Jen and I played the Dream Casting game, coming up with our list of actors to play in the new Watchmen movie. (Jen hasn’t read the book, so I had to attempt to distill the characters down as best I could for her to understand. I have to bust it out for her tonight to look at.) Apparently somebody found a way to adapt the book (although Terry Gilliam tried to do it and couldn’t—now that would have been a movie). There’s no word on official casting yet, but here’s our list:
| Rorschach: | William H. Macy | Think about it. You need somebody short, sort of average (if not ugly) and able to play a resigned insanity. |
| John C Reilly | This guy is good at the loveable loser (think Magnolia) or frightening maniac. He might be too tall though. | |
| Nite Owl: | Skip Sudduth | I think he’d be perfect for this role. Paunchy, approachable, believable. |
| Daniel Baldwin | I think it’d be a stretch, but he could pull it off. He’d have to get rid of that annoying Baldwin “I’m too cool for school” thing. (Thanks Todd) | |
| Silk Spectre: | Jennifer Connelly | I forgot about this one. Perfect. Thanks, Jen. |
| Mariska Hargitay | This was Jen’s first idea, but I’m not entirely sold. | |
| The Comedian: | Robert Forster | Again, Jen picked this one, and I think she nailed it perfectly. |
| Burt Reynolds | Todd’s immediate choice. I think if he could be reigned in a bit (again, think what Paul Thomas Anderson did for him in Boogie Nights) he’d be perfect. | |
| Ozymandias: | Jeff Goldblum | Jen sold me on this one-he’s intelligent, he (used to) be built, and he’s taller than you think. |
| Dr. Manhattan: | Matthew McConaughey | Just consider it. He’d have to be tall, bald, blue, and nekkid. This guy looks pretty good bald, and we all know he likes to be nekkid and play the bongos… |
Extra reading: Wikipedia entry (excellent primer) | The Watchmen annotated guide. Your suggestions?
Friday night Jen and I had Todd and Heather over to the house for a cocktail and to start the Wedding Dress Face-Off. Heather was not ecstatic about the first one, which meant that a second trip to the car dealership bridal shop was needed to decide. After the modeling was finished, we drove into the frigid depths of Columbia to try out an Indian restaurant Jen’s friend Meg told us about. The menu selection was larger than a Manhattan phone book (and the names were just as exotic), so we started with appetizers: the best samosas I’ve ever had, as well as some potato pancake type things, and some tasteless white cakes served with dipping sauce. Once we had some drinks and food in us, we found it was easier to decide on entrees. Heather tried something whose name I can’t remember, which was delicious; Todd had the palak paneer and Jen had alu ghobi, which was just spiced enough to be perfect, and I ordered dosai masala, which sounded great on paper but came out looking like a giant rolled pancake. Inquiring how to eat this massive thing, I asked our waitress, who told me in her best english to use my hands. (This was about the time when the other patrons of the store were laughing at me.) Everything was excellent, and vegan to boot, so I think we’ve found a new favorite restaurant to explore southern Indian cusine—just minutes from home.
Saturday, Jen and Heather returned to the original bridal shop to look again at the first dress that caught Jen’s eye; after a prolonged search for the dress in question, they found it and Jen began to put it on. Heather took one look and agreed—it was the dress. Here’s the best part: when they got it to the counter, it turned out that the dress was 1/2 off the original listed price. Score!